Lockdown and social distancing could make our immune system weaker

In this article for The Daily Mail, author Jack Wright reports on Sunetra Gupta’s theory that prolonged lockdowns and social distancing could actually weaken our immune system.
According to Gupta, as people are cocooned inside their homes, they do not develop theory defenses against germs – defenses, she says, which are essential for fighting future pandemics.

Editor’s Note: Many countries around the world are battling with increasing infections, while Sweden, which adopted a no-lockdown policy, has recorded decreasing number of infections and COVID deaths. One can wonder why, but Sunetra Gupta provides us with the answer [see Sweden’s COVID-19 experience from the eyes of a Swedish doctor].

Before the pandemic, there was already a growing recognition of the role of viruses and bacteria in human evolution, but all of these were thrown out the window [see Our complicated relationship with viruses]. We are back to the world of the sterile, a world where our bodies become so weak even the common flu could lead to death.

We add the Daily Mail article on this site, despite it being being published in June 27, 2020, because we need to ask whether the increasing infections among younger people could be due to the prolonged lockdown and obsessive cleanliness [to understand how the immune system works, see Understanding the immune system of children may be the key to understanding susceptibility to SARS-COV-2].